


Ms. Clancy

by ThereButForCabbage



Category: Fancy Nancy, Nancy Clancy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-24 20:42:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 18,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThereButForCabbage/pseuds/ThereButForCabbage
Summary: What happens when our fancy heroine and her friends grow up?





	1. YouTube

**Author's Note:**

> We don’t know with any certainty when the events of the original source material take place. Based on clues in the text, it is unlikely that the main protagonist was born any earlier than 1998, and quite likely that she was born after 2000. Even by the earliest estimate she would be 19 years old as of this writing. This story takes place when she is roughly 30 years old, therefore no fewer than eleven years in the future, and probably more. I am not a futurist, only a parent who has had a _lot_ of time to think about this stuff, and I hope the reader will forgive me if this narrative seems rooted in 2017. If such things bother you, rest assured that, as our heroine might say, _ce n’est pas le propos_.
> 
> You can come to this with no background or a lot, but it will make much more sense if you read the “Nancy Clancy” chapter books. There are only eight of them, they don’t take long, and they’re (obviously) interesting enough to make me want to know what happens to these kids.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Facing a hard economy, our heroine tries something new.

Channel logo: Designed, rendered.

Crosslinked social media accounts: Up and running.

Four backlogged videos: Uncharacteristically, ready to post.

Storyboards for four future videos: More characteristically, not quite finished. Or begun.

The World’s Newest Video Blogger surveyed her checklist. Part of her wasn’t ready to take the final step, wanting instead to get those storyboards drafted before she bit off more than she could chew and fell behind schedule. Yet she also knew that sometimes the way to begin a new enterprise was just to begin. Driven by that, and with the knowledge that a lifetime of procrastination had never gotten her into _serious_ trouble, she was about to check the final box and name her YouTube channel.

She’d been agonizing over the name for weeks. It had to be engaging, unique, and immediately recognizable. It also had to communicate elegance and design savvy—this was to be, after all, a fashion- and décor-centered channel—without being intimidating or hard for her audience to pronounce, which unfortunately excluded most of the French language. Nearly everything she’d come up with had fallen outside one of these criteria or another, and few enough friends knew about the project that she couldn’t get much advice from that quarter.

(She was struck for a moment. One friend would have known exactly what to call it, would have practically jumped up and down in excitement. Don’t go there now. Focus.)

There was always the old standby, the one she’d used mentally as her working title. It was a childhood nickname for which she had retained a certain lingering affection. She worried, though, about putting too much of herself into the project. How easily could someone use the name to identify her? Realistically, not at all. There was no electronic database of old nicknames out there, and her first name was common enough. She never appeared in the videos, which were stop-motion explainers with text overlay and no voiceover. She never even allowed her own hands to appear on camera, reasoning that her standards for nail enameling were sufficiently rigorous that someone might take notice and identify her based on that alone.

(Paranoid? _Peut-être_ , but the things she’d read by women with public Internet presences were … disturbing.)

The name was friendly, memorable, and a bit self-deprecating. It was fine, and this was no time to let perfection get in the way of good enough. The World’s Newest Video Blogger breathed in. Then out. She flexed her fingers, currently tipped with grey-fading-to-lavender to match her ensemble: lavender blouse, offset by her grey slacks and jacket, accented by a vintage pendant, and set ablaze by her curly, braided hair. (She had a special storyboard idea all but worked out, in her mind if not in writing, about how redheads face the unique challenge of people telling them to plan their wardrobes around their hair color.) She laid her fingers on the keys, stared at the interface, and dared it to laugh.

Use YouTube as: _Fancy Nancy_.

Enter.


	2. Jo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Late night Clancy family therapy.

Having posted the first weekly video (“Dress Up With Shoes You Can Walk In”), Nancy visited several of her favorite fashion forums and, using a _nom du clavier_ , enthusiastically recommended that everyone take a look at this new up-and-coming channel. That accomplished, she flossed and brushed, got into pajamas, checked her work inbox, checked her view count on YouTube (two views, both by her), checked her inbox one more time, and finally dragged herself to bed.

Sleep did not come. She was anxious about the YouTube launch even though she knew it would take time to develop a viewership, especially since her desire for anonymity kept her from using her network of friends to advertise. There were people she could trust, of course, but some careful sleuthing could identify the earliest chatter on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about her channel, and then it was just a matter of comparing friend and follower lists for a common account. But why was she so worried about that? What if someone _did_ figure out she was behind it? She wasn’t famous or rich or worth blackmailing. She could just imagine the headlines:

YOUTUBE FASHION SENSATION “FANCY NANCY” UNMASKED. STRUGGLING FREELANCE CREATIVE TYPE FROM WESTCHESTER. NOBODY CARES.

No, something else was gnawing at her. She needed someone to talk to—someone who already knew as much as anyone could know. She sat up and, without getting out of bed, twisted rightward to look back at a clock sitting on the roll top desk that doubled as her nightstand. The numbers **11:36** glowed a cool indigo light. She grabbed her phone and sent a text message.

> You awake?

A few seconds passed, and then:

> just finishing dinner  
>  what’s up

Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep. Nancy was an insomniac. Her sister didn’t qualify, she thought, because you can’t fail at something if you never even try.

> Got a minute? I need to talk, and I’m worried it won’t make any sense but I think it’s important that I say it to another person and not just in my own head.

There was no replying message; the phone just rang. Nancy swiped to answer.

“Hey there.”

“Hey there yourself,” Jo said. There was a lot of noise in the background. Voices, and Nancy thought she heard someone playing guitar.

“Where are you?”

“Hanging out with some friends.” Not really an answer to the question Nancy had asked, but she decided not to press it. Jo was 27 and didn’t need looking after.

“I’ve never understood how you have any kind of nightlife in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s all about who you know. How do you have no nightlife at all in _New York City_?” Jo gave her best small town rube impression as she sounded out the name, as if the two of them hadn’t grown up five minutes’ drive from a Metro-North station.

“I’m in Brooklyn, and not that part of Brooklyn.”

“Excuses. What’s going on, babe?”

Nancy paused for a moment, collected her thoughts, and then spilled everything. About the channel, about her anxiety over being discovered clashing against her hope that the project would get attention. Jo was silent through it all. If it hadn’t been for the occasional outburst of terrible background singing, Nancy wouldn’t have been certain her sister was still on the line. There was a pause.

“So,” Jo finally said, “you’re taking crazy measures to be sure that nobody finds you even though nobody is looking for you, and even though the consequences of being exposed to the world as the kind of person who wears makeup to work despite working from home are no big deal. And by the way, personal note, there is no risk at all of anyone finding that out because anybody who’s spent three minutes in a room with you already knows it.”

Another pause. Nancy felt as if she ought to take offense at some part of what Jo had said, but couldn’t pinpoint anything that wasn’t obviously true. “Yes …” she ventured.

Jo cut in again. “So I’m just wondering, off the top of my head, if maybe you’re trying to avoid being found because if you’re doing _that_ then at least your precautions are the reason nobody’s finding you. And maybe that way you can keep open the possibility that somebody _is_ looking for you, hoping to connect or _re_ connect, because if you’re out there and she doesn’t come asking then it’s because she has no interest, but if you’re _impossible_ to contact, then you don’t know that for sure and you get to be in control of the situation. Oh, that pronoun was picked at random, by the way.”

A third silence, this one lasting longer, as Nancy felt her stomach tense.

“Jo?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure someone else drives you home, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re never this insightful when you’re sober.”

“I’m always this insightful, Nance. I don’t talk as much when I’m sober. Anyway, you really think I’d operate heavy machinery on even one beer?”

“ _Bien sûr, tu ne le ferais pas_. Sorry. Big sister instinct.”

“Sometimes the big sister isn’t the one who should be worrying. You okay for the night?”

“Yeah, it’s … this was really helpful. I don’t think I understood what I was worried about, and now I think I do.”

“Look, whatever happened, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t you. She ghosted the whole universe, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Look, I know abandonment hurts. But I think you need to accept that you’re not in control of this one at all. And anyway, you have a professional web site with your real name and headshot on it, right? Anyone who wants to find you and doesn’t know how is an idiot. Not that either of us has named names, but we’re not talking about an idiot, are we?”

“No.” One shaky breath. “Not at all. _Merci beaucoup, Joséphine_.”

“ _De rien_ , Nancy.” Call ended. It was a lot to think about, but after that Nancy slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The great thing about writing JoJo is I can take her in almost any direction I want.


	3. People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy waits for the Internet to find her.

The week that followed was perfectly mundane. Nancy spent too many waking hours at work, which in her case meant devoting more effort to soliciting clients as actually working for them. The explosion of self-published e-books was supposed to have been her big break, but so few of these authors were interested in an editor, let alone a book designer, and even fewer had anything to spend. The ones who were willing to pay too often went with cut-rate service and got cut-rate results, which was a double blow, because Nancy was the sort of person who had a hard time watching her own job done badly by someone else.

Not that everything about the week was so dreary. She had people. Nancy had grown up going to her district’s anomalously tiny public schools, and she was a poor fit for summer camp in the way that an armadillo is a poor fit for figure skating. As a result, she had spent very little time during her formative years interacting with large groups of people she didn’t know. Her greatest fear as she packed to go off to a big state university had been that she might not be able to function without the tight social circle that had defined her existence thus far. In college she would have no proven friends to turn to in times of crisis, and she couldn’t say with conviction that she could make such friends again. For by this point in her life Nancy had come to understand that she was harmlessly, but undeniably,  _un peu bizarre_. (That’s French for “a little weird.”) She had a thousand minor idiosyncrasies that would strike the average person as snobbish, vain, or aloof. She was neither aloof nor vain, and only a little snobbish, but that was hard to explain convincingly without the backing of a posse of friends who’d known you since your first feather boa.

In the end Nancy had learned something unexpected about herself in college. She was, despite her fears, tremendously likeable. True, at first glance her fellow 18-year-olds assumed that she was a self-important queen bee with daddy’s platinum credit card, but that set them up to be even more receptive when they realized that she was a bright middle-class francophile with an overactive aesthetic sense and a perennial desire to be helpful. She also discovered that she had a hidden superpower: Though not a fan of superhero comic books as such, she had been raised by a fan and could say intelligent things about the genre. This proved a convenient way to rattle people who thought they understood her, and had the effect of broadening her circle of friends beyond what one would expect of an arts-and-humanities gal whose vocabulary included at least 20 words for different shades of pink.

So, people. Nancy had a way of finding community wherever she happened to be, and her not-currently-gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood was no exception. She played with kids on stoops, attempted to chat with abuelas in hilariously bad Spanish, and volunteered as a storytime reader at the local public library. There wasn’t much time for any of this, but even a little of it could get her through a day whose highlight would otherwise have been convincing an author that his libertarian economic manifesto would be better received if it were _not_ published in italicized Papyrus.

A week in, a week out. Nancy made another video for the backlog, posted the next one in the queue (a use-of-space-and-light tutorial for small apartments), threw out a few more publicity calls (the previous post having received a nice round 20 views in total, seven from its author), and waited. The labor she’d put into this project was partly a matter of self-actualization, of staking a claim and doing essentially what she’d wanted to do with her life since before she could read, but there was also an economic angle. YouTube could be monetized, and her bank balance wasn’t getting any larger each month. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It was March. Her father had been asking her for weeks to give him her tax information so he could meet the April 15th deadline, and she had been putting it off in order to avoid the uncomfortable conversation about her lack of financial stability. Her plan was to attract viewers first, then begin accepting ad space once she had established a certain brand loyalty, but maybe if she could rack up a few hundred hits she’d at least have something positive to tell Dad. Something to deflect the unspoken comparison with her little sister who, for all her oddities, managed every year to proffer a simple W-2 with wages that exceeded her living expenses. Success in this venture would, she hoped, allow her finally to set her house in order.

Then one morning she woke up to find that the Internet had regurgitated on her proverbial lawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have so much fun imagining a college-aged Nancy.


	4. Overnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy gets attention for the wrong reason.

Nancy roused from an uneasy dream about semicolons and found herself, as often happened, staring at her phone’s e-mail app without remembering having opened it. The usual scattering of automatic bill pay reminders and promotional codes from Michaels was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a solid wall of YouTube comment notifications. Nancy had never been an “inbox zero” person, but she knew roughly how many unread e-mails she had sitting around, and estimated that her inbox count was now almost 200 higher than it had been last night.

_ Sa. Cré. Bleu. _

She got out of bed, grabbed her laptop, and set it down on the dinner table. She switched to the open tab already showing her latest video and reloaded. Over 2,400 views overnight. One of her breadcrumb trails had worked! She reloaded again. Over 2,500 now. Sensational. She had spent so much time reminding herself that overnight success was more fairytale than practical goal that she could scarcely wrap her mind around what was happening. One thing she could comprehend, though: Good news for Dad. Easy “how’s work” conversations at Passover, and maybe even better by Thanksgiving. Time to get down to business.

Nancy had learned YouTube’s advertising interface while avoiding making her first video, and was relieved that it hadn’t changed too much since then. She selected the option for ads you could skip after five seconds, which would net her a lot less but which would allow her followers—followers!—to grow accustomed to the idea. She would leave the unskippable 30-second ad slots for when she was a can’t-miss feature of the fashion blogosphere. First step achieved on the road to financial solvency, and more than a  _ soupçon _ of self-worth rescued, she set about reviewing the comments for moderation. It would be a chore with all those messages to read and approve, but the self-styled economist with no sensitivity to typefaces hadn’t gotten back to her, so she had some time.

It seemed, though, that comment moderation was switched off. She was certain she had turned it on … or at least, that she’d meant to turn it on before going to bed that first night. The comments were already displayed. Annoyed with herself, she decided she would be a responsible channel administrator and read each one. Her dedication to that task didn’t last 30 seconds.

People who didn’t know Nancy very well often assumed that she was naïve. She wasn’t, particularly. She harbored about as much bigotry as one would expect of a white girl who had grown up with a black best friend in a mixed suburb outside of NYC, but if she lived in a bubble, she at least knew the bubble was there. She was, however, a little too young and a little too sheltered to be more than vaguely aware that her first name had once been a popular slur directed at men who were attracted to other men. Now her awareness was growing less vague with every passing second, and she could feel the blood congealing in her veins as she stared in horror at the discourse—if such language could be so dignified—in her second video’s comment section. It appeared that somebody had designated this “Fancy Nancy” character a prime target for a homophobic mob, and a scattering of differently-minded commenters had taken it upon themselves to beat the mob back. Or were they strawmen meant to ridicule the opposition? Nancy didn’t bother reading far enough to figure that out. She closed the tab, powered down the laptop, closed it, and sat motionless at the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know this is what would happen.


	5. Clara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We flash back to a school reunion. Old faces are seen.

Four years ago: The Fifteen Year Reunion.

Most K-5 schools don’t even have formal reunion events, and Ada M. Draezel Elementary was so small that there was nobody on staff free to organize them, but there was an old habit of alumni getting together at some venue not too far from the school to reminisce. When you spend six years cooped up with the same tiny group of kids, they become significant forces in your life, and the connections tended to run deep. By tradition the two reunions were the Five Year Reunion, which consisted of high school sophomores hanging out with old friends, and the Fifteen Year Reunion, for young adults done with college and usually not pinned down by too many responsibilities. (The Ten Year, which had always been sparsely attended with so many classmates away for school, had been undone years before by the advent of Facebook.)

Nancy’s reunion was held at the King’s Crown, which had been rented out for the occasion. The usual family-style tables had been temporarily replaced with tall cocktail tables, a special event permit to serve alcohol had been acquired, and Yoko, who was working on her doctorate in organizational psychology, had volunteered to arrange the room for optimal social atmosphere. Of the 19 who had graduated in Nancy’s class, 13 made it to the Fifteen Year with a scattering of plus ones in tow.

Robert’s family had moved out of district after elementary school, which meant the ten year high school reunion two years down the road wouldn’t be his to attend. He’d made a special point of coming, despite his and his wife’s obvious exhaustion from caring for the new baby. They seemed to have a hard time maintaining conversations, or consciousness, but tiny Odessa (“I wanted to name her ‘Oops,’ but Sandra wouldn’t let me”) was charming enough for all three of them. Nola had come with a boyfriend who seemed incredulous at the very idea of a grade school reunion, and by early evening the relationship appeared to be under strain. Clara brought her girlfriend—also, to everyone’s temporary confusion, named Sandra—who struck Nancy as standoffish and a little jealous, never taking an eye off Clara when she could help it. Lionel brought his phone, which took up at least as much of his attention as Odessa did her parents’; he was working for a state assemblyman’s office, and apparently trying to manage some kind of political crisis between cracking jokes and eating chips.

Grace had been closer with Clara than with anyone else there, so the occasional question about Grace’s absence tended to fall on her. All she allowed was that Grace had a lot going on and was sorry she couldn’t make it, which was uniformly understood to mean that Grace, who had always had a hard edge to her, hadn’t bonded with many people in the class. Clara, who was remarkably difficult to dislike, had been the major exception.

If Clara had been ready for her temporary PR assignment, Nancy most certainly had not. Everywhere she turned, everyone she talked to, she ran up against the same question that everyone assumed she, and only she, could answer.

“Nancy, where’s Bree?”

Nancy felt her left eye twitch. She’d been holding it together so far, but hadn’t everyone in the room already asked her this question? She kept her gaze down on her glass of kir berrichon.

“I— I’m sorry. Forget I asked.”

She hadn’t meant to put anyone off—the flash of anger must have been visible somehow. She looked up, and then deflated. More than any other face here, this one looked unchanged since Draezel. Something about the eyes. Her short blond hair was tucked under a knitted beanie (which Nancy thought guiltily was an odd choice that didn’t flatter). Her mouth, usually free with a smile, was now a flat line.

“Clara—.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I guess I’m the last to know. I can ask someone else.”

Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know where Bree is, and neither does anyone else.” She glanced both ways, taking in the room, then said more quietly, “I haven’t heard from her in two months.”

“And that’s a long time?”

“It’s the longest we’ve gone without talking since I can remember. I mean, literally. I remember when my sister and brothers were born, but I don’t remember meeting _her_. I just …” No words. Barely even breaths.

Clara nodded, her expression blank. “Want to go outside for a few? It’s probably cooled off out there.” Nancy nodded without speaking.

As they walked to the exit, she was vaguely aware of eyes tracking the two of them from a nearby table. With Clara guiding her by one arm, she sat down on the stoop in front of the restaurant. It really was getting colder. For at least a minute they both sat side by side, breathing in the dark, looking out at the quiet street.

“Sandra isn’t into the festivities, is she?” It seemed as good a way to restart the conversation as any.

“She’s mostly here to keep an eye on me. Don’t worry. You should try talking to her.” Clara turned around and gave Sandra, who was indeed watching them through the glass front door, a smile-and-wave.

“Keeping an eye on you?” Nancy turned her head to Clara, carefully leaving the rest of her body where it was for appearance’s sake. “Does she think you’re going to convert me and sweep me off my feet?”

“We’ve known each other since, what, kindergarten?”

“I think so. Are you going to say we’re too much like sisters or something?”

“Nah. Just that if I were going to convert you, I would have done it by now.” Nancy had to laugh at that. It felt good. After a tasteful interval Clara asked, “Are you worried something happened to her? Bree, I mean.”

Nancy noted the subject change and decided to go with it for the time being. “I was at first, but no. Bree was an assistant district attorney. If a prosecutor is killed or goes missing or something then it makes the news, right? I’ve checked with everyone. I managed to cajole a secretary into admitting that she quit on short notice, but that’s all anybody can, or will, tell me.”

Clara nodded.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Nancy asked.

“I’m good at secrets.”

Nancy looked out at the street again. “I don’t feel like I belong here. With this crowd, I mean. Some of it is Bree, yeah, because I don’t know if I can navigate school again without her, but mostly it’s _me_ . Everyone here is so grown up. Robert’s married and a dad. _Por l’amour de Dieu_ , Lionel is working in _government_. I feel like the same kid, only bigger and less sure of all my choices.”

“I think everyone feels that way.”

“Seriously? You’re a teacher, right? Isn’t that a big step away from being a kid?”

Clara scratched at her left temple under the beanie. “Most days it just feels like I never left school. Which is literally true, of course. I’m just on the other side of the desk.”

“But … I don’t want to play twenty rounds of failure-to-launch olympics, but I’m not seeing anybody and my job feels like the worst parts of high school. I’m not doing anything but surviving.”

“Don’t take survival for granted, Nancy. Not everyone pulls it off.”

“That’s dark.”

“Some things are.”

Nancy examined Clara’s face. There was a weight there that she didn’t remember seeing before, one that her other classmates didn’t seem to have taken on just yet. She was embarrassed to be wondering for the first time whether she might not be the only one to have come to reunion with a lot to think about. She admitted as much to Clara, who nodded.

“It’s okay. There are some things going on right now that I can’t discuss. I don’t know if that’s selfish or generous of me after what we’ve been talking about, but there it is.”

“You’ll tell me when you can?”

Clara sat on that one for a moment. “If and when, yeah. Some of it isn’t my call to make.”

Nancy had never been as close with Clara as with Bree, and could never quite read her the way she could her old best friend, but something clicked. She decided to gamble a little.

“I never really got along with Grace,” she said. Clara’s attempt at non-reaction was Times Square at night. “You know that. No need to go over it. But she’s still one of us, isn’t she?”

Clara gave the slightest of nods, not facing Nancy. She said nothing.

“Can you do me a favor? Next time you see her, just tell her I said hi, all right?”

The door burst open behind them, releasing into the night the strains of a fifteen-year old radio hit played at unreasonable volume.

“Hey, I knew I’d find all the cool kids somewhere around here!” Lionel motioned to sit down either next to or between Nancy and Clara, realized there was no room, and made an awkward show of leaning against the guardrail on one side of the steps. The door swung shut and the night quieted a little.

“Hey Lionel” said Clara, looking a little relieved at the interruption. “Off the hook yet?”

“Oh, crisis resolved. Tomorrow morning my boss’s boss is gonna resign in disgrace at a press conference.”

“Wow. Who is that?”

He named a legislator. Neither of the women had ever heard of him, which seemed not to surprise or disappoint Lionel at all.

“That’s why I love state politics. Twice the mess, none of the glory.”

“Wait, does this mean you’re out of a job?” asked Clara.

“Yeah, but I was on the edge of quitting anyway. Now I’m out of that dungeon through no fault of my own, so this is a best-of-all-worlds scenario from a career standpoint.”

Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Does the assemblyman feel that way?”

“You wouldn’t care if you knew what he did. Which you will tomorrow, I guess.”

“I’ll take your word for it. So what are you going to do now?”

“Now that I’ve proven myself capable of solid work for little pay under an abusive supervisor, the opportunities for more of that should be limitless!”

“I’m serious, Li.”

Lionel thought for a moment. “Not sure. I could try something in the for-profit world I guess. I doubt any other government job would be— Clara, are you okay?”

Clara had been itching at the same point on her left temple, and a dark stain had begun to appear on her cap.

“Clara? What is tha— _mon dieu_. Are you bleeding?”

Clara adjusted the cap and winced. A gauze bandage, mottled red and brown, shifted and fell out, revealing a jagged, stitched-up laceration with swollen, bruise-colored edges heading back from the temple. She moved to pull the cap down over the cut, thought better of it just in time, then took off the cap and held her hand loosely over an area above the space between her left eye and ear.

“Sorry,” said Clara, “I thought it was secure. Let me go inside and take care of this.” Without another word she stood up and headed through the doors toward the women’s bathroom, stopping as she passed one of the tables to pick up a bag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True story: I showed a friend page 77 of "Nancy Clancy: Late-Breaking News!" and she immediately asked me whether Clara gets a pageboy cut and joins the track team. I laughed, then remembered that Clara's new short haircut is mentioned near the end of the book. I'm not in the habit of gaying characters just for the lulz, but I think I'm justified in writing Clara as if she's been aware and out since middle school.
> 
> I decided to split this chapter in two. Next installment will round it out.


	6. Character

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learn a bit about Clara's adventures. Tabletop role playing is discussed.

“What the _hell_ happened to Clara?”

Lionel was standing over Sandra, seated at her table and nursing an ice water, as Nancy hurried to catch up behind him. Sandra didn’t look pleased with his tone or demeanor.

“Why are you asking me like that?”

“ _Because_ … er … because she didn’t want to talk about it. And sort of told us to ask you. But we’re feeling _really sensitive_ about it,” he concluded, not sure whether to save face with a justification or a wisecrack. “In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have followed her into the women’s room in the first place.” Sandra raised one eyebrow, but seemed to accept Lionel’s retreat as some sort of apology.

“We just want to make sure she’s okay,” Nancy added, hoping to turn things around. “I mean, in a big picture way. Aside from whatever’s on her mind and that awful head wound.” Nancy took a stool and sat next to Sandra. “That sounds worse when I say it out loud. We’re worried. What happened?”

“You follow the news? Did you see about the acquittal last week?”

Lionel blinked. “Omaha?”

Sandra shook her head. “Trenton.”

“Was that before or after Omaha?”

“After, but that’s not the point. Clara was at the main protest a week ago.”

“And one of the rioters hit her?!” Nancy was appalled.

“Clara was one of the ‘rioters,’” Sandra returned. “She was hit in the head by a tear gas cannister.”

“Why would someone fire a tear gas cannister at her head?” asked Lionel.

“Because someone was scared and not thinking straight, and decided it would make a nice projectile weapon.”

Nancy waved her hands. “Wait, just wait. Clara was rioting?”

“Protesting.”

“Whatever. That’s just … it doesn’t sound like her.”

“Agreed,” said Lionel.

Sandra, who was visibly irritated by this point, produced a phone from somewhere and pulled up a picture. It was the edge of a barricade set up by the protesters (or rioters) in Trenton, viewed from the outside of the area they’d cordoned off. “May I?” asked Nancy, and with Sandra’s nod she panned and zoomed until she settled on a face that could only have been Clara’s in a parallel universe.

“Where did you get this picture?” Nancy asked.

“I took it. I’m a photojournalist. It was taken with a real camera; I just carry it in my phone.”

Lionel was agape. “I’ve never seen her with that kind of expression. I didn’t even know she had those muscles in her face.”

Nancy, too, was taken aback. “It’s just so uncharacteristic. Clara has always seemed like … I don’t know …”

“Such a good girl,” Lionel finished. “Right?”

Sandra nodded. “That’s right.”

“Then what changed?”

“Nothing.”

“Have you looked at that photo you took?”

Sandra took a slow breath while staring directly between Lionel’s eyes. She was a little taller than Nancy, with short, businesslike brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and skin and facial features that came off as non-white without actually belonging to any recognizable ethnicity. Her speech patterns and personal grooming choices were a stark contrast with Clara, whom Lionel had once called “the femmiest femme who ever femmed.”

“When you call her a ‘good girl,’ you mean something very specific. Not just good, also quiet and obedient. Goodness isn’t always like that.”

Neither Nancy nor Lionel sad anything.

“Has either of you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?” The two of them looked at her as if she’d just changed the subject from startling revelations about their friend to tabletop role playing, which was fair. “I guess not. Ever heard of character alignment?”

Nancy snapped out of it. “You mean like kerning?” This time it was Sandra’s turn to stare in confusion.

“All right,” Lionel interjected. “Let’s assume that neither of you has any idea what the other is talking about. Sandra, please explain character alignment.”

Sandra, her assessment of Lionel’s personality clearly unfinished, decided to move forward. “Character alignment is the way D & D characters’ sense of morality is described. It’s done with a three-by-three grid. The up-and-down axis is the basic moral axis: Are you good, neutral, or evil?”

Nancy nodded. Lionel spoke.

“Hey, if we’re talking about something like this over drinks, you need to draw the grid on a bar napkin.”

“I have a notepad here. Let me just get—”

“No! Gotta be a bar napkin. It’s how these things are done.” He grabbed one from an adjacent table, looked it over, crumpled it a bit for the proper effect, then spread it out again and handed it to Sandra, who decided there was no point in arguing. She drew a square divided into nine smaller squares, with the top row labeled _good_ , the middle row _neutral_ , and the bottom row _evil_.

“So far pretty simple, but here’s where it gets interesting.” She then labeled the left column _lawful_ , the middle column _neutral_ , and the right column _chaotic_. “Each character is described both in terms of their moral state and their attitude toward rules and social order.”

Nancy frowned at the grid. “Shouldn’t ‘good’ and ‘lawful’ go together?”

“Was Rosa Parks being evil when she refused to get up?”

“That’s different. The law itself was wrong.”

“And millions of lawful-good people followed it and worse laws. Even people who knew segregation was wrong stopped short of defying it.”

Lionel chimed in: “So the Civil Rights Movement was all about being … chaotic-good?”

Sandra shook her head. “Hardly. Some people wrote letters, or supported the movement through the courts and the system of government. But it wouldn’t have been complete without some people in the neutral or chaotic area. Nothing but a crowd politely asking the government to change laws that were working perfectly.”

Nancy had been listening and thinking. “So … lawful-evil would be the police who enforced segregation laws. The cop who arrested Rosa Parks.”

“Not necessarily! A lot of them were lawful-neutral, which is a scary kind of person to have around in large numbers. They’re the kind of people who like to do what they’re told without picking it apart too much. They’re the ones who say—”

“‘I was just following orders,’” said Lionel, cutting her off. “I think I’m getting this.”

Sandra looked ready to say something unpleasant about Lionel’s habit of interrupting people when someone peered over her shoulder and said “Hey, is that the character alignment grid?”

“Yes,” replied Sandra, taken off balance. “I’m sorry, you are ...?”

“Oh, _I’m_ sorry! Yoko Maeda, one of Clara’s old classmates.” She must have seen the two of them come in together, or just asked somebody who the mopey woman with the glasses was. “I didn’t mean to intrude, though I guess I just did. Sorry again. Professional interest.”

Sandra was getting an odd education in Clara’s old school buddies. “Professional?”

“A friend and I wrote a paper last year modeling social stability under different governmental and societal conditions using the character alignment paradigm.”

“A paper? For school, or …” she trailed off.

“Academic paper. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a journal interested in publishing it.”

“I don’t mean any offense here, but that doesn’t sound too surprising.”

“Well,” said Yoko, looking perhaps a bit put off, “a lot of good papers are hard to publish. So we reworked it into a civilian version and it’s going to run in next month’s _WIRED_! What’s it doing on a bar napkin, anyway?”

“It has to be on a bar napkin under these circumstances,” intoned Lionel.

“Obviously. I meant why are you talking about it at all.”

“Clara got shot by the police and Sandra is trying to explain how that makes sense.”

“She _what_?!” 

“ _EVERYBODY SHUT UP!_ ” yelled Nancy, just as one song was fading out and another hadn’t come on yet. The entire room turned and looked to see what was the matter. “Er, sorry! I didn’t … the context was … just ignore me, okay?” she muttered, feeling she could have handled that better without having any idea how. She redirected toward Sandra. “I just want to know what’s going on with my friend.”

“I would like nothing better than to explain,” replied Sandra. She spoke in a slow, steady monotone that could have cut glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I lied. This episode is getting long, and it's going to be at least one more chapter.
> 
> In the books Yoko tries to sell bead jewelry, only to find that nobody's buying because everyone makes jewelry just like it. That's her entire arc. Without rereading the series, I don't think she gets more than two pairs of quotation marks. I thought it would be nice for her to have something to do.


	7. Chaotic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More on Clara's history, and on her alignment. Yoko reminisces.

Sandra’s disquisition continued mostly uninterrupted after that. Whether the change was due to Nancy’s redirection, or her thrumming her very hard and sharp fingernails on the back of Lionel’s hand every time he looked ready to interject, no one could say. Feeling that things were finally winding down, and wondering what the back of his hand would look like in daylight, Lionel ventured a question.

“So you’re saying Clara is really chaotic-good?”

“I wouldn’t pigeonhole her so neatly,” said Sandra, who seemed to be in a forgiving mood. “People in real life move around that grid all the time. Even people in good fiction do it.”

“Like Matt Murdoch,” offered Nancy. “He’s lawful-good, but at night he’s chaotic-good as Daredevil.” Lionel, aided by renewed nail pressure, suppressed a laugh as he watched Sandra decide whether she had really just heard what she just heard.

“You’re used to seeing Clara follow rules, right?” said Sandra, shaking it off. “So am I. She stops at stop signs and pays her taxes as early as possible. I once saw her duck into a Starbucks so she could wash her hands with soap and water before entering the school where she works, because she’d eaten a sesame seed bagel on the way over and the school has an allergy policy. She came out with a bottle of juice she’d bought, because the bathrooms are for customers only. That isn’t chaotic behavior. Taken in isolation it looks lawful.

“The thing is that those rules don’t hurt anyone. In fact they’re mostly designed to help, and even the Starbucks rule is a sensible agreement about sharing resources. I once ribbed her about the tax thing, just joking about how she’s the only American so eager. She shot back that some of her students were on food stamps. To her, sending a check to the IRS meant buying breakfast for those kids. She couldn’t justify waiting.” None of this was surprising to Nancy, but it felt good to be reminded why she’d always liked Clara so much. With all the pressure from work and with other friends living closer, she hadn’t been good about keeping in touch over the past few years.

“But that’s the thing about Clara. She really, deeply cares about people, and she’s always reminding you that everybody is somebody. And she expects the same from others, especially from leaders and the laws they make. Maybe she learned that in Draezelton, but you can’t assume it’s always going to work that way.”

Nancy and Lionel exchanged a glance. There was no city or town called Draezelton. That was the local nickname for the oddly-shaped district that was Ada M. Draezel Elementary School’s catchment area, a tiny and, over the past few years, highly sought-after place to live for families with children. Someone had noticed that Draezel was untouchable by test-driven federal education policies due to an arcane convergence of zoning ordinances, civil rights case law, and a mistyped act of the New York State government that had been intended as nothing more than a regional tax on carbonated beverages. There were perhaps a dozen legal experts in the world who understood why this worked the way it did, but since five of them were associate justices of the Supreme Court of the United States—the Chief Justice having authored a fiery dissent—teachers and administrators at Draezel were free to enact highly creative curricula with little interference from anyone but the PTO. (None of Nancy’s friends had noticed there was anything unusual about their school experience until they had gone to college and talked with other recent high school graduates. Bree, who had gone to an elite private university beyond the reach of Nancy’s GPA, had exclaimed once on the phone that “I’m not any smarter than these people, but I’m so much better at _thinking_!”) In any case, “Draezelton” was not a word in the national vocabulary, so either Sandra had grown up nearby and somehow escaped all their notices or she and Clara had had some significant talks about the latter’s childhood, which was telling.

“So,” Lionel put in, “Clara has a problem with bad laws.”

“Clara has a problem with laws and institutions that harm people. It took her a long time to accept that we could even have things like that in this country. When things are bad—when the cops and the courts and the government are hurting the people they’re supposed to be protecting—you don’t see that rule-following Clara anymore.” She pulled up the same picture on her phone and held it out. “That face she’s making, that’s what happens when love gets angry.”

“Chaotic, then?”

“Like a swarm of bees. It scared her to find out she even had that in her. I guess there wasn’t much worth defying when she was a kid.” Sandra’s tone hinted that her youth had included a greater than sufficient number and variety of things worthy of defiance.

“Well, there was that one time …” Lionel ventured.

Nancy raised an eyebrow. “That one time what? Even _I_ rebelled more than Clara.”

“Your black lipstick phase was a harrowing time for us all, but I don’t mean like that. We weren’t in the same class in seventh grade, right?”

“Hmm …” Nancy thought for a moment. “I don’t remember. Did you have Forsythe for math?”

“Never.”

“I guess not, then.”

“Okay, but remember Mr. Hodges?”

“Of course! The scary guy who subbed for Mrs. Ortiz while she was on maternity leave.”

“That’s him. So a lot of what fell on him to teach was 20th century history, and we got to the Holocaust. In hindsight this seems totally nuts, but what he did was, he always had this goldfish in a bowl on his desk, and at the beginning of class he told us that we had to remain perfectly still and silent in our seats and anyone who stood up in the next ten minutes or made a sound, no matter what, would go straight to the principal’s office. Then he scooped the fish out of its bowl and dropped it on his desk, and it was just flopping there, unable to breathe. A bunch of us started to say something, but he gave us that look he had and we shut up immediately. We were just terrified of him, and he was so nuts we were sure he was telling the truth.

“So after a few seconds Clara stands up in her corner and starts walking toward the desk. I swear his eyes bugged out. He started telling her to sit down, getting louder every time. By the end it was this crazy shouting, ‘Miss Foster, you WILL return to your seat, that is an ORDER.’ I still remember, that’s exactly how he said it, only I can’t do the voice. That last time it got her, she flinched and got a look on her face like she knew she was in serious trouble, but she kept going up to the desk while he barked at her and just put the fish back in the bowl. It started swimming around and probably forgot the whole thing two seconds later, because goldfish, right?

“I guess the whole thing was supposed to teach us that you don’t really know how brave you are until you’re tested, and you can’t really know who would have stood up to Hitler and who wouldn’t, but Clara totally wrecked his class by doing it so quickly. We all wanted to high-five her at lunch for sticking it to Hodges, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Everyone figured she got in some kind of trouble for ruining the lesson. Which is a terrible way to teach, of course, because she did what we were all supposed to do. She just got there first. Rumor was that he got fired for even trying that stunt, because after that year we never saw him again.”

Nancy and Yoko looked equally surprised. “Well,” Yoko said after a moment, “that beats the time in eighth grade when she smuggled me a brownie from the cafeteria when I had lunch detention.”

“Why did you have detention?” asked Sandra.

“I pulled a guy’s hair. Hard.”

“Why?”

“He was trying to cop a feel in the stairway.”

“So,” said Sandra, “are we noticing a pattern here?”

“Wait,” Lionel said to Yoko. “That was _you_?”

Yoko gave an innocent look of confusion. “What was me? Did people talk about it?”

“It was Harrison, right? That was the guy. Long blond hair.”

“Yes, that was him.”

“And the bracelet?”

Again, Yoko put on her innocent face, but she clearly found it impossible not to grin. “A gesture of reconciliation.”

“Bracelet?” Nancy asked.

“Someone left Harrison a beaded bracelet taped to his locker attached to a heart-shaped piece of paper,” Lionel explained. “I was in the hallway with him when he realized it was strung with hair. I’ll never forget the look on his face.”

“A few strands of it snagged in my ring and it seemed a shame to waste it all. I was originally going to wear the bracelet myself, but getting it long enough to fit around my hand was too much trouble. Then I tried tying it onto my wrist directly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to tie human hair in a knot one-handed?”

“No,” said everyone at the table emphatically.

Behind Yoko, Clara was back in the crowd with a clean bandage and her silly hat. She was playing peek-a-boo with baby Odessa. The conversation drifted, but Nancy lost track and watched the game. _Like a swarm of bees_ , she thought. _What about me? What does nobody know about me? What haven’t I learned yet about myself?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't mess with Yoko.
> 
> I decided something had to explain why Nancy's third grade experience looks so unlike third grade in the No Child Left Behind era. Crazy legal loophole seemed as good a reason as any.
> 
> The goldfish test is a real thing, and it's considered ethically and pedagogically questionable these days even if you ignore the needs of the fish. See the next chapter for more on that.


	8. Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara gets a flashback and an epilogue.

Seventeen years ago: Seventh grade social studies.

Clara remained in her seat as the rest of her class filed out at the bell. She’d always been small for her age, and at twelve looked like a ten-year-old, but she’d never had the sense before that everything around her was so massive and she so powerless. She tried to look straight down, or forward, to avoid Mr. Hodges’s face. She’d never been in any kind of trouble before, not _real_ trouble anyway. She was a good kid. She kept repeating that to herself: _I’m good I’m good I’m good I’m good I’m good_.

She expected Hodges, who was exhausted following the departure of a totally unmanageable group of preteens, to call her over to his desk to be informed of her impending doom. Instead he stood up, straightened his jacket, and walked over to her. He was big, over six feet tall and probably shorter than he had been as a young man. He had a paunch and jowls and a great walrus of a white mustache, with very little hair left on his head. He turned a chair and sat down a few feet in front of her, casually crossing one leg over the other. She made no attempt at eye contact.

“Why did you do that?” he asked. His voice was calm and controlled. Clara remained silent, looked past him. “It’s a simple informational question, Miss Foster. I would just like to know why you did what you did in class today. You’ve never struck me as a rule-breaker, your habit of single-spacing your papers notwithstanding.” He would get nothing from her.

“This is awkward,” he allowed. “I plan to retire next year. No doubt many of your classmates would rejoice if they learned that. I leave the spread of such important information at your discretion.” Why was he doing this? “I’ve been teaching in this district for half my life, you know. It’s a wonderful place to grow up. Welcoming, safe. Have you lived here your whole life?”

Clara, confused as could be, nodded.

“Then this is probably the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you, unless I’ve misread you these past few weeks.” Clara shrugged. He was right. Why couldn’t he just call her parents? Oh God, what would her parents say?

“I’ve been using this lesson every three years for the past thirty-seven. I mete it out so that each cohort of students has time to forget any stories they might hear about it, or at least dismiss them as hearsay about scary old Hodges.”

At this Clara’s voice returned without warning, without permission. “So you’ve tried to kill twelve fish for no reason?” She couldn’t believe she was saying it even as she said it.

“Thirteen, but also none. I wait exactly sixty seconds, timed on the clock on the back wall, then return the fish to its bowl. Goldfish can live for a surprisingly long time out of water. Hours in some cases, or so I’m told. Never had the heart to check.

“Does it ever get all the way to sixty seconds?”

“It does. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the power of tyranny over a subject population. The tyrant rarely has to act as long as his subjects believe he is _ready_ to act. Every year we talk about the same atrocities, and every year all the smart aleck kids hold forth about how _they_ would have behaved in the same circumstances. One class in three gets to find out how scared they are of the principal’s office, then consider how they would have acted under the eye of the Gestapo.

“Your class did not find that out. You defied me after exactly seven seconds, and now they are all free to assume that they would have acted in the eighth second if you hadn’t done it first. No doubt they now consider you slightly braver than they are, or slightly more reckless.”

Clara felt something in her guts. She was still afraid, but the fear was fermenting, transforming. It took her a moment to understand what it was becoming. Anger. Anger at the unfairness of this exercise, this ritual acted out by this cruel man.

“So every three years you hold a kid behind for this … lecture? The first one to do the right thing? That’s who gets in trouble?” She still wouldn’t look at him. “Would you feel better if I’d waited ten seconds? Or fifteen? What is this? How long are they supposed to wait before they learn your _stupid lesson_?” Clara squinted through tears. She was no longer in control of her own voice, and worried her body would go next. What was going to happen to her now?

“You misunderstand, Miss Foster. I expected to wait for a full sixty seconds with little or no disobedience, then move on to the part where I reveal to you and your classmates just how easily you can all be cowed into submission. Please look at me for a moment.”

Clara considered the wisdom of disobeying him yet again, and decided that she’d dug as deep a hole as she was willing to dig on principle. She wiped her face on a sleeve and looked him in the eyes, tried to burn through them with her stare. His eyes weren’t angry, though. There was something else behind them.

“Clara,” he continued, growing suddenly quiet, “in thirty-seven years I have never seen anyone do what you just did. _Nobody_ rescues the fish. Twelve years ago there was a young man who came close, but he had an impulse control disorder and the old drill sergeant voice drove him back to his seat anyway. I haven’t had to dust it off again until today. Hence the awkwardness. If your class were to get it into their heads that defying me was _correct_ , what do you think they would do? I would lose them for the rest of the year, and you all have too much to learn. I can’t publicly congratulate you for being the first child in a third of a century more afraid of your own conscience than of me, but that’s what you are.”

Clara stared blankly at him. She wasn’t entirely present anymore; she was trying to make sense of what he had said at the beginning. Were other people so afraid? Or so unconcerned about doing what was right? Her mind drifted to a story her mother, an otologist, had told her once, about a patient who had heard ringing in his left ear his entire life and just assumed that everyone else heard the same ringing in their left ears. The patient had been astonished to learn that this was not normal, and angry that nobody had told him. Only he’d never told anyone else about the ringing because, in his mind, it was too mundane to be worth a comment. _Is that me?_ she thought. _Have I been hearing a ringing my whole life that nobody else can hear? What will they think of me if they find out? What do I think of_ them _now that I know they can’t hear it?_

“I … I thought …” she trailed off. How to say this? “I thought they were good people. I thought I was surrounded by good people, mostly. What’s going on?”

“I’m sure most of your classmates are good people, or will become so once they’re done being seventh graders. Truth be told, if I’d confronted each one of them alone with the test a few others might have taken action. I have an excellent vantage point whenever I run this exercise, and invariably the students who would _like_ to act are the ones clandestinely looking around for support. They don’t want to be the only ones, don’t want to stand out. The power of social conformity is at least as great as the threat of force.”

“But why am I the different one? It sounds like it would … I never try to stand out like that. Other people, it would make sense. Lionel is always drawing attention to himself.” Lionel, whose obvious crush she was going to have to address gently at some point. “Or Ximena, or, well, I guess you don’t know Nancy, she’s not in this section.”

“We teachers do talk amongst ourselves. The redhead with the blue guitar?”

“Yeah. They always look for attention. They want to be different. I’m just not interested.”

Hodges shifted for a moment into a thousand-yard stare, then back. “Sometimes I forget the power of years and perspective. Those friends you talk about aren’t trying to be different _so that they can be different_ . They are trying to gain attention, negative or positive, to build their own status.” A confused look from Clara. “They want to be popular, at the center of the group. They can only afford to be different as long as they aren’t so different that it takes them _outside_ the group.”

Clara looked down at her hands and thought about this. She wasn’t popular, at least in the sense of being talked about and admired from afar. People didn’t want to hear gossip about her. Being popular meant everybody wished they were your friend. Clara was only popular in the extremely limited sense that everyone actually seemed to _be_ her friend, which was not at all the same thing.

Quietly, half to herself, she asked “Am I supposed to do something about this?”

“If you want my advice, hold onto it. You’ll feel pressure to change it. From friends, maybe from boys.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” she replied with the slightest hint of a grin.

“You say that now.”

“Yes, I do.”

Hodges blinked and decided to move on. “You have a highly developed moral sense. That is a gift, no less than if you had a talent for math or music. When you have a gift, you cultivate it. Don’t let it go to waste. I suppose I ought to tell you something about how, but I think you will figure that out on your own, and anyway it’s time for recess.” He thought for a moment. “Here’s an observation first, and then a piece of solid advice. First: The Holocaust happened because there weren’t enough people like you. Second: Make a habit of asking yourself from time to time whether that is still the case.”

Clara looked out a window facing the school’s enclosed athletic field and playground, at her classmates darting around that yard. “Would you mind if I stay here for now? I just want some time to think.” Hodges nodded. He then retreated to his desk, pulled up a stack of homework assignments, and set to work on them with a red pen. Clara sat, looking out the window, listening to the sound of her own breath.

 

* * *

 

Four years ago: The day after reunion

 

“I’ll just be a minute.” Clara put a hand on Sandra’s shoulder, gave her best reassuring smile, then stepped out the passenger door of the car. She hadn’t told anyone what she was doing here, and all Sandra knew was to stop at this corner. Clara stretched, oriented herself, and walked through an ornamental iron gate.

Her walk along the path inside the gate took her past hundreds of headstones and the occasional large monument. As a kid she’d always had the appropriate spooky reverence for the town cemetery, but she’d never stepped inside it until now. She glanced down at inscriptions and dates, mentally calculating how old this or that person had been. A few of the results caught in her throat, and she moved on. Eventually she came to the stone she’d been looking for. It was a simple grey rectangle topped with a military insignia she couldn’t decipher. The epitaph was a line she knew, from John Dewey: WE ONLY THINK WHEN WE ARE CONFRONTED WITH PROBLEMS. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Mr. Martin Hodges, aged 82 years at the time of his passing, had probably lived a more interesting life than she’d ever know. She took a breath, then sat cross-legged directly on the ground in front of the headstone. She hadn’t prepared a speech.

“I didn’t think you were a very good teacher back then,” she said. “I don’t think so now, really. That wasn’t the way to do it. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. It turned students against you, and your message backfired. With almost everyone. Whatever you taught me, I think so much about what you could have taught them. I’m so much more careful than that with my students. Does that make me a coward? Am I coddling them so I don’t upset them? I don’t think so, but go ahead and speak up if you think otherwise.

“Anyway, I just wanted to fill you in. I have a nasty head wound from a run-in with the police, so I guess I’m doing okay in the moral defiance department, right? You might not think so. I don’t know where you stood on much of anything aside from Nazis, but … there’s this guy who got away with murder because of the uniform he wears. The whole thing was caught on video, and he still got away with it. I don’t know what I’m going to tell the kids on Monday when I show up in class looking like this, or what they’ll figure out on their own. Maybe I should call in a sub and give myself a few days to heal until I can comb something over the sutures. Then again, maybe they need to see Ms. Foster get up and keep moving. Maybe some of them will see my picture on the news, and figure it all out. Much as I like job security, I think I’d like that too. You taught us all what it’s like to be afraid, but maybe what these kids need is to see what _unafraid_ looks like.”

Clara sat and read the full inscription again. Glanced back at the car off in the distance. Turned back to the stone.

“But you did something for me. You named something I didn’t know existed, and it turned out it was there. Had been the whole time, but I’d never noticed because I thought it was just part of being normal. I guess that means I’m supposed to thank you. So … one teacher to another, one soldier to another, thanks. I guess I’ll see you later. Don’t wait up though, okay?”

She stood up, stretched, and headed back to the car. She didn’t let the details bother her on the return trip through the gate.

“Done with your visit?” asked Sandra as Clara got back into the car.

“Yeah. Just a few things I had to get off my chest.”

“You’re not going to tell me who’s back there, are you?”

“Another time, probably. After last night you don’t really want to get thrown in the deep end again, do you?”

Sandra blinked once. “Yes.” She tried not to smile too hard at the face Clara didn’t want to make.

“Well … okay, look. It goes back a long way. Really long. We had this maternity leave sub in seventh grade—”

“Hodges, right,” Sandra nodded. “Is this about the goldfish?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hodges is loosely based on a maternity leave sub I had in middle school.


	9. Crowd

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The YouTube phenomenon grows. Nancy receives excellent service.

The present day.

 

Nancy resolved to spend the day ignoring the conflagration on her YouTube channel. There was work to be done—not necessarily paying work, but soliciting clients and submitting bids was more than half of her job these days. A video idea occurred to her while she was watering the potted bromeliad that lived on her kitchen counter, but she instinctively jerked away from any thought associated with her blogging career. As the day progressed, though, she realized she could just take down everything and re-launch it under a different name. Preferably a name she’d focus-grouped on an audience that could keep its mouth shut. She sifted through her mental address book of trustworthy people with enough sensitivity to language to catch anything she might miss. A minute before 2:00 in the afternoon, she committed.

> _Hi._

An agonizing hour later came the reply:

> _Hey. Sorry. What’s up?_

Nancy pasted the message she’d composed ahead of time.

> _Could I run some ideas by you? I’m thinking of starting a YouTube channel (information not to be shared) and I’m looking for the right name. Something catchy and distinctive that doesn’t send any wrong messages by accident. You know how to thread that needle in politics, so I thought you might be helpful. Do you think we could meet up some time soon to talk through some ideas? And just catch up? It’s been months since facetime._

Lionel’s reply came quickly this time.

> _So funny that you’re starting a channel. I was a little worried you were behind the Fancy Nancy thing. Is this for your business?_

Nancy stared at the phone, then made a voice call.

“Um, hey,” Lionel answered.

“Li, what do you mean by ‘the Fancy Nancy thing’?”

“Wow, you’ve been off all social media today, haven’t you? It’s this huge weird thing. Someone made a video from pictures of an apartment that’s supposed to be all about letting in light, but everyone’s reading these crazy interpretations from subtext. Props, things like that. And there’s this bizarre homophobic undercurrent that I guess was there from the beginning that nobody really understands, but people are just going bananas arguing about it online. There’s even a subreddit devoted to—”

“A sub-what?”

“Subreddit. A specialized forum on Reddit.” Here Lionel waited for comprehension, then stopped waiting. “Which is a web site. Anyway, a subreddit devoted to figuring out the location of the apartment based on light angles, views out the window, and things like that. It’s somewhere in Brooklyn, they’re all sure about that. Between Brooklyn and the name I really was kind of worried something was going on, but I knew you wouldn’t get involved in this kind of insanity. Anyway, I’m happy to talk, but I’m just gonna lead with maybe you should avoid putting your first name on this channel. It’s … kind of toxic right now.”

“Toxic,” Nancy managed to croak out.

“Everyone will probably forget in a few weeks, but right now it’ll lead all their little hyperlinked brains straight to Fancy Nancy. Not you, I mean. That other one.”

During her junior year in college, Nancy had signed up for an introductory filmmaking class on a whim. She’d gone in with no concrete expectations, and had been surprised at how much the art and science of cinematography fascinated her once she’d learned a few things about it. In particular, she’d been taken with a camera effect called the “dolly zoom.” A dolly zoom is a shot in which the camera backs away from the subject, almost always a character, while the zoom lens is adjusted to keep the subject’s image the same size within the frame. The result is a sense of unease as everything around the subject appears to spread out, as if space were being warped. As Lionel’s talk of subreddits sank in, Nancy began to feel that a hidden camera somewhere must be dolly zooming her right then and there.

“Li … they’re trying to figure out … they’re looking for my apartment?”

“Please tell me you didn’t just say ‘ _my_ apartment.’”

“I think I’m in trouble.”

“Well, it’s not like they’ve _found_ your apartment.”

An egg hit the nearest window. Then another. Nancy ducked and ran into the bathroom.

“Nancy, what was that sound? It didn’t … oh hey, look. I just reloaded that Reddit page and they seem to be coalescing on a more specific location. Which looks to be your address, if my memory serves. Seriously, what is that noise?”

“I think I’m in _serious_ trouble.”

 

* * *

 

Lionel stayed on the phone for a while, but left once it became clear that Nancy wasn’t in any actual danger. His apology was profuse and repetitive. It was also mysterious, since his established _modus operandi_ for begging out of things was to describe in tiresome detail what he had to do instead. While she assumed Lionel was up to something important and probably work-related, it was hard not to feel a sting.

Nancy spent the day indoors, ducking under windows. A crowd of two dozen or so had formed in front of her building, and had quickly devolved into bickering clusters as they realized none of them agreed on what to be upset over. Whatever the world had read into her video, it wasn’t consistent or coherent. Eventually, lacking a response from her window, most of them left out of boredom. A few brave souls tried to storm in, only to be repelled by a ground floor tenant who did not speak English—indeed, Nancy had never managed to discover which, if any, language he spoke fluently—but who had phonetically acquired the phrase “no menu,” which he shouted while holding his ground on the stoop and swinging a broom at the invaders.

After the last protester went home, Nancy figured the worst was over. The mob had converged, found nothing, and probably moved on to the next social media outrage. If anyone were going to do anything beyond harass her and break some eggs, they would have done it. Improbably, a glance at Twitter indicated that nobody had even identified her by name. If so, it was over. Some day years or decades from now she’d laugh about the hilarious misunderstanding that had launched her moment of stardom. (A silver lining occurred to her: The YouTube channel must have gotten an enormous number of hits. She would have to take it down and relaunch under a new name, but her checking account would surely appreciate a one-time boost.) All would be well.

Then the next day came.

And the next.

And the next.

Because why would anyone _really_ believe the ordeal could be over so quickly?

But then the next came, with no news. Each day she breathed a little more easily. She began to take stock of the incident on Sunday, and suddenly it hit her that she should have called the police. _Pourquoi diable_ hadn’t she called the police? She must have been more rattled than she’d thought, to miss something so obvious.

Then, as she stepped out late on Friday morning to meet with a client during his lunch break, a well-dressed and not unattractive young man approached her as she walked toward the subway entrance.

“Hello! I’m so sorry to intrude, but are you Nancy S. Clancy?” He had very dark skin, perfect teeth, and an accent that screamed “former British colony.”

Nancy wasn’t entirely unwound after the nonsense of the weekend, and had a healthy suspicion of strange men in public spaces who wanted her attention. She decided to play a favorite card. With a bemused and well-practiced smile, she asked “That’s not a real name, is it?”

“It certainly is!” he replied, and held up a small laminated copy of the head shot from her professional web site. She tried not to let her face tell, and failed. The man produced a piece of paper from nowhere and proffered it with a flourish that Nancy perceived to be somehow gentlemanly. She took the paper, then took a step back, and looked it over.

“You’ve been served. Have a splendid day!” he said, then turned on one heel and walked around the corner with impressive speed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is how a lot of social media frenzies feel to me, especially if I don't find out about them until a few hours after they explode.
> 
> What is Lionel up to, anyway?


	10. Risk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another reunion. People grow.

Two years ago: The Ten Year High School Reunion

 

“You keep using that word,” Lionel declared in his best Mandy Patinkin. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“Sorry to burst your bubble, Inigo, but I know what ‘impossible’ means.” Lionel’s interlocutor, who had once stuffed him in a locker but whose name he couldn’t quite recall, took a drink. Club soda and ice. “Not possible. Can’t be done. Waste of time.”

“She’s brilliant.”

“Nobody cares.”

“People who don’t know she’s brilliant don’t care. We’re fixing that.”

“Listen to me, Linus. Rural. Upstate. Does. NOT elect a twenty-five-year-old unwed mother. Not for dog catcher, and definitely not for State Assembly.”

“She’s already on her town council.” Point Lionel. “Also, dog catchers aren’t normally elected. You must be thinking of judges.”

“Hey man, it’s your time and you’ll do what you want with it.” Locker guy, who worked for a major news service, pulled away with a smile and a shrug. Seconds later he was chatting up Tamar and acting like no more than a three-out-of-ten creep.

Lionel tapped the campaign button on his jacket. “She isn’t twenty-five,” he muttered. He scanned the room. Yoko seemed to have trapped Ximena in a conversation. (“I can’t predict what _you_ will do. That’s impossible. But given many, many clones of you, I could predict the swarm’s behavior with _disturbing_ accuracy!”) Sandra and Clara were making a comic show of slow-dancing like awkward middle schoolers, out of sync with the music, elbows at full extension in order to accommodate all eight months of Sandra’s pregnancy. Nola was trying to get a strange man, presumably her current significant other, to meet some of her old friends, but he was clearly hammered and showed no sign that he meant to un-hammer at her request.

Someone was missing. Sweep left, sweep right. There, by the bar, trying to catch up with Nola’s whatshisname’s BAC. Something purplish-red in her glass. He moved her way, caught her eye after considerable effort.

“ _Lionel!_ ” She said it in two syllables, as in the French: lyon-ELL. “ _Comment allez-vous mon cher? Avez-vous déjà pris le pouvoir à Albany?_ ”

“Hey Nancy,” he said, wondering how much he should pretend to understand. “What’s that you’re drinking?”

“ _C'est un caribou_.” She lifted her glass. “ _Ce n'est pas vraiment français, mais assez proche. Et grâce au le sirop d'érable, vous pouvez à peine goûter l'alcool!_ ” She proffered the drink at him, nearly overbalanced, corrected herself, took a large sip.

“Hey, let me see that” he said, trying to hold a neutral tone. He took the glass and led Nancy by one arm to the opposite side of the room, leaving the drink on a table among a jumble of empty and half-finished glasses. He located a booth, reasoned that it offered some isolation and that Nancy was unlikely to fall out of it, and gently maneuvered her into place. He sat opposite her, looked around for anyone to ask for a glass of water, found nobody, and let it go. “How are things, Nancy? It’s been a while.”

“ _Eh bien, j'ai eu_ —”

“Nancy! _Anglais, por favor._ ”

Nancy snort-laughed, stared at the table between them, and said nothing. After a good 30 seconds, Lionel wondered whether she’d forgotten the question.

“How are you doing, Nancy?” he asked in his best speaking-to-a-foreigner voice. “Is there anything you would like to talk about?”

Nancy took a couple of deep breaths, blinked hard a few times, kept her gaze pointed at the table. “No, I don’t think there is.” She thought about that for a moment. “Not about me, anyway. What about you?” She looked up, noticed the button. “Do you know there’s a typo on your … your …”

“It’s not a typo” he said, cutting off her noun search. “I’m running Lysa Washington’s campaign for a seat in the New York State Assembly. Lysa with a Y. She’s great. You’d definitely vote for her if you lived in the middle of nowhere.”

“Wow. Look at you, running a campaign. Lot of responsibility. You must have really impressed her.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “she wasn’t exactly beating away campaign managers. She’s something of a dark horse candidate, though I wouldn’t ever say that on the record.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“She’s young. People assume she can’t play hardball. We know different.”

“How young? Under thirty?”

“She’s twenty-six.”

Nancy blinked hard twice more. “Oh. Twenty. Six. Well, that’s … even running sounds impressive. And you running a campaign, _aussi très, très impressionnant_.” Lionel didn’t like where this was going, but didn’t know what to say. “Clara’s going to be a mom. That’s impressive too, right? Yoko’s going to conquer the world with brain swarms or something, that’s okay, I guess. She’ll take care of everyone. She’s nice.” Lionel really wanted to get Nancy a water, but didn’t want to risk leaving her alone in the booth or she’d be off English again when he came back. “I write content. Is that impressive? Some people write news stories, or novels, or short fiction, or essays. But I write _content_ , and that’s awfully important. Nothing would _contain_ anything if we didn’t have content. I’m good at it, too! They give me a topic, I research it as quickly as possible with no regard for credibility or integrity, and I write the content.”

“You’ve always loved writing,” Lionel offered.

“You’ve probably seen some of it. Click on the ‘next’ arrow thirty-eight times and you can read one of my compositions in its entirety. Reading shouldn’t go too quickly, I don’t think.”

“So … you’re not happy with your professional life just now.”

“I am not happy with my professional life, yes, because my professional life is a _complete waste of time_. I am _astonished_ that they haven’t made a robot that can do this yet. I could tolerate it if I were paid commensurate with the indignity of this job, but instead my compensation is dictated by the quality and importance of my work.” She took a deep breath. “And neither of those is terribly high, in case that was unclear.”

“You are a very articulate drunk and left nothing to speculation. Bravo.”

“And Nola seems so good at dealing with adversity …”

“Are you, ah, seeing someone?”

“There was the guy I told you about, Avi. Didn’t last. He said he couldn’t get past my _hashkafa_.”

“I don’t know what that is, but I meant—”

“I looked it up. It’s Hebrew for _Weltanschauung_.”

“Nancy, I mean are you getting some kind of professional help or advice, because you seem depressed and kind of messed up right now.”

“Kind of. Kind of.”

“Kind of messed up, or kind of getting help?”

Nancy shrugged. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“Seeing someone.”

“I’ve never been a therapy person, really.”

“No, the other way. I never hear about you getting involved with anyone. What’s with that?”

Lionel’s turn to shrug now. “Not a lot to report. I’ve had a few ill-advised things with other staffers in Albany. You know, shared-intense-experience-as-bond stuff. I don’t think anyone expects anything to come of it, and nothing does. No time.”

“The ambiguity of your language is intriguing. You know you never have to hide anything, right?”

“Huh? Oh. Ha! No, trust me, I make the _horizon_ look bi-curious.”

“You sure?”

“Sure as I am of anything. If I ever change my mind, you’ll be the second person I tell.”

“Second?”

“You want me to leave some beautiful dude hanging? Forget it! See, this is why I hypothetically gave up on women.”

This set Nancy giggling. “It’s good to see you, Li. Sorry I’m dumping all this on you.”

“Don’t worry about it. Think you’re up to dance? I’ll bet we can top those two.”

“Picking on a pregnant lady! Shame. Anyway, I doubt I’m much of a dancer right now. Where did you put my drink, anyway?”

“Somewhere safe. From you. And hey, you’ll make me look good by comparison. Let’s go.” He stood up and held out his right hand. Nancy reached out to take it with hers, aiming to stand. Lionel, considering her sense of balance, took her elbow in his left until he was sure she was going to stay up. His grip felt oddly springy, Nancy thought, but she was ready to chalk it up to the wine. And self-pity. And whiskey. She was going to have to rethink drinking like a sad Québécoise.

Lionel hadn’t been much of a dancer in high school and didn’t appear to have worked on the skill much since then. He was forceful, though—in the sense of leading assertively (if awkwardly), but also in terms of sheer physical strength. Once they passed through a close partner position, and his upper arm inexplicably had some _there_ there. This was surprising enough to penetrate the igniferous grape-and-rye mixture. His grip _had_ been springier! But how? In all the time she’d known Lionel he had always been on the soft side, if not the large one. The most athletic thing she’d ever seen him do was hang from a jungle gym by his knees. The second most athletic was getting hit in the head with a soccer ball.

“Let’s take a break,” she offered.

“Really? We’re just getting started!”

“If I keep moving like this I might throw up on your shoes.”

“Hey, look at the time. Let’s take a break.” Lionel managed to flag down a water this time, and Nancy risked an open-sided chair.

“So, when did you become a gym person?” she asked. Cutting right to the chase seemed the appropriate and still slightly drunk thing to do.

“Huh? Well, I’m not, really.”

Nancy reached out and wrapped her left hand around his right biceps. “Then where did this come from?”

“Heh. Something else. Really, not a gym person, I promise.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a politician?”

“Not with my friends! Fine, no games. Remember that blow-up two years ago? My boss quit, thought he could avoid jail, went to jail?”

“Of course!”

“Well, I was having a rough time with the bad-job-to-no-job transition. A few friends started noticing—it was bad enough I couldn’t hide it. I was depressed and really not taking care of myself. Figured I could try and get around the mental issue by doing something with my body for a change, so I fell into an Internet hole over what to do.”

“And you made a decision, _oui_? One that you’re avoiding getting to for some reason?”

“Not _avoiding_. I mean, yes. It just doesn’t feel like a thing I would do.”

Nancy cocked her head and raised an impatient eyebrow.

“Fine,” he relented. “Brazilian jiu-jitsu.”

“Brazilian ... jiu-jitsu?”

“See, that’s just what I said.”

“What makes it Brazilian?”

“Mandatory bikini waxes for all.” Nancy threw a balled-up napkin at him. “Okay, not really. It’s what you get when an early judo expert—a student of the guy who founded it—goes to Brazil to teach and a bunch of guys there think ‘yeah, but it could be even better, so let’s fix it.’” He paused. “I guess they were thinking in Portuguese.”

“So what did they do?” asked Nancy.

“Well, how much do you know about judo to start with?”

“I once sewed a kimono out of some bedsheets. I still have it.”

“I knew I missed you for a reason. Anyway, it’s supposed to be more practical and is focused almost entirely on ground fighting, which is when two people are in a fight and at least one of them isn’t standing up. Pins, locks, that kind of thing. Lots of rolling around on the mat, really.”

“And you’re _certain_ you’re not into guys?” The napkin flew back at Nancy.

“Less now than ever. We smell awful when we do manly things.”

“So you’re keeping up a martial arts hobby and running a campaign at the same time?”

“Well, no. I’m on a break from BJJ—ugh, those are just the initials!” he exclaimed as Nancy made a show of suppressing laughter. “I’m in rural counties all the time, away from my dojo. I exercise when I can so things aren’t too bad whenever I go back. I’m really wrapped up in this campaign, though.”

“So why is this candidate so exciting?” asked Nancy. “You were talking about her before but I think half the words you said were ‘ethyl alcohol.’ At least, that’s how I remember it.”

“Feeling better?”

“A little. Sorry. _Et merci_.”

“ _Não há de quê_. Look, she’s … I don’t think she can win this race, and that makes me an optimist. Everyone else _knows_ she can’t win. She’s really smart and a total policy wonk who cares about her community, but she’s a young woman with a kid who doesn’t know his father and she’s running against a well-connected incumbent.”

“So why are you doing this? I’m intrigued.”

Lionel shrugged. “I decided I needed to take some risks. Everything I’d been doing with the Assembly had been so calculated, all about whether we could win instead of whether we were trying to do the best thing for the most people. Look, that’s how politics works when you go behind the curtain, no avoiding it. I guess I just needed some more … heroics? More heroics in my life. So now I’m running a crazy uphill campaign for a possibly ideal candidate in a district that doesn’t want her.”

“Wow. Any windmills in that district?”

“Some electric wind turbines. Lysa wanted to use that joke in a newspaper ad, but I nixed it. Wrong audience. You’d like her.”

“I’ll bet I would! Hey … it’s great that you’re doing this. The world needs people trying impossible things. Um … could you hold on just a minute? I just need a break.”

Lionel nodded. Nancy stood, straightened a few things, and headed off to the women’s room. She took out her phone on the way in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued. I probably should have stopped sooner, but this conversation just went on and on.
> 
> Nancy has a thing for obscure cocktails.


	11. Cipher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flashbacks flashbacks flashbacks cryptography flashbacks flashbacks.

Fourteen Years Ago: 10th Grade.

Summer was early, and patience of all kinds had worn thin over hot and humid May. Traffic accidents were up. Parents snapped at children, and children at parents. Old, unspoken grievances between neighbors finally got their hearings. On a quiet street, a lone figure reposed on the strip of lawn between two houses. Despite the sticky-brilliant climate, she wore a full-sleeved off-the-shoulder dress made voluminous by layers of lace and tulle. Most of her skin was pale, but everything else—her hair, clothes, eyelids, nails, and lips—was a shade of red so deep that younger sisters, parents, and males in general carelessly described it as “black.” In one hand she held a section of the long rope that had likewise recently taken up residence on the lawn. She examined it closely, noting the frayed fibers that attested to years of friction, exposure to the elements, and constant catenary tension. No more tension now, just two frizzed and torn ends.

“Another stage in the demise of my innocence,” she said to no one in particular. “‘Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,’ but not every end leads to some other new beginning. Not at all.”

She heard a door open, chose to ignore it. It came from the house that wasn’t hers. Footsteps approached.

“What’s up?”

“Observing a hole in one of Seneca’s silly platitudes,” she answered without looking up. “I would tell him personally if he weren’t dead.”

The interloper walked over and sat down beside her. She wore printed green harem pants and a cropped white T-shirt. She was taller, more athletic, and her brown skin gleamed in the afternoon sun. Her braids were up for the heat, and numerous sparkly things hung from her ears and throat. An outside observer might have laughed at the contrast, but suburban streets in bad weather are always short on witnesses. “Really? I’m a little sad it finally gave out, but it was only a basket on a rope. When was the last time we even used it?”

“Last semester! Finals!” the dark figure protested.

“No, that doesn’t count. Josephine sent that to me, not you.”

“And I sent you a message as soon as I found out JoJo was sticking her nose where it didn’t belong!”

“You know she doesn’t like when you call her that. She isn’t five anymore.” No answer. “Listen, cherie. We didn’t have unlimited digital everything in preschool. The mailbox served its purpose, but we don’t need it anymore. All it really did the past few years was annoy the neighbors and make my parents worry about the resale value of our house.”

Nancy, taken off guard, dropped her carefully cultivated post-Stoic façade. “Resale value?”

“That pulley put a lot of strain on the attachment point over the years. Probably on your side too.”

“Wait! Just wait. Are you … you’re not moving, are you? You’d tell me. Of _course_ you’d tell me. Right?”

“Nancy—”

“I mean, I know our relationship isn’t _exactly_ what it used to be, and maybe I’m not as present, but we’re in different classes and I am going _through_ some stuff right now, and … and the last time we thought one of us was moving it was me and remember how we wanted my parents to let me move in with you? It feels crazy to say it now but we were _serious_ about—“

“Nancy! Relax. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh. Oh, well, that’s good. I guess.”

“Look, I’m off to college in two years and Freddie will be in five. My parents are talking about whether they’ll really need a four-bedroom house and …” Her neighbor appeared to consider something, then decide against it. “It’s different for you because of Eddie and Bobby. A decade, minimum, before your parents are empty nesters. You get it?”

Nod.

“Good. I really hope you’re wearing sunscreen, by the way. You look like you could get burned by a porch light these days.”

Nancy shrugged. She wasn’t about to admit that she looked so pale thanks to indiscriminate use of an extremely fair SPF-30 foundation. Sulking underground was a much more glamorous excuse for a vampiric complexion. Time to change the subject.

“ _Alfred_ doesn’t like it when you call him ‘Freddie.’”

“ _Touché, mon amie_. He’s my brother and giving him a hard time is my job. Doesn’t mean I can’t stand up for your sister.” She glanced at her phone. “Dinner’s in ten. You know how it is.” She stood up and went inside without another word.

* * *

Two weeks later.

 

> _Pur̀er Anapl,_
> 
> _V ubcr guvf svaqf lbh jryy, naq ab zber haqrnq guna arprffnel. Ersyrpgvat ba gur erprag qrzvfr bs gur Gbc Frperg Fcrpvny Qryvirel znvyobk, V qrpvqrq gung jr fgvyy bhtug gb unir na bcra naq frpher onpx punaary. Zl raq bs gur punaary vf cheryl.purely@_____.pbz. Jr pna hfr zbqrea rapelcgvba vs jr jnag, ohg gur znva frphevgl srngher vf gung abobql ryfr xabjf nobhg guvf nqqerff; vg unf bar checbfr, juvpu vf fraqvat lbh zrffntrf naq erprvivat zrffntrf sebz lbh. V’yy xabj lbh erprvirq guvf yrggre jura gurer vf fbzrguvat—nalguvat ng nyy—va zl vaobk._
> 
> _Guvf cntr jvyy unir gb qb hagvy gura, fb: V jnearq Obool V jbhyq gryy lbh ur ernqf lbhe qvnel vs ur qvqa’g qryvire guvf fnsryl, ohg V arire fnvq V jbhyqa’g gryy lbh vs ur qvq. Svaq n arj cynpr gb uvqr vg. Tnergu vf tbvat gb fgneg orvat irel avpr gb lbh fbba. Uvf vagragvbaf ner abg puvinyebhf. Qb gur fpnel avuvyvfg inzcver cevaprff guvat ba uvz, cergraq gb ernq uvf zvaq, gura gryy uvz lbh xabj nobhg gur org. Ur jvyy abg unaqyr vg jryy. Xryfrl naq Rqjvan jrer wbxvat nobhg jung n ybfre lbh’ir orpbzr guvf lrne, naq Tenpr bs nyy crbcyr fanccrq ng gurz. Fur npphfrq gurz bs orvat wrnybhf orpnhfr lbh’er abg nsenvq gb or lbhefrys. Anghenyyl, abar bs guvf vasbezngvba pnzr sebz zr._
> 
> _Yvxr gur fgngvbarel? Vg’f zntvpvna’f synfu cncre yrsg bire sebz bar bs zl qnq’f pbzzrepvnyf. Bapr lbh’er qbar jvgu guvf zrffntr, frg vg ba sver._
> 
> _Wr g'rzoenffr,_
> 
> _Oerr E._

Nancy stared at the letter (for it had to be a letter). It had been lying at the foot of her bed, rolled into a tube and held in place with an origamically knotted strip of the same paper, when she’d woken up. It wasn’t very _good_ paper—it felt crinkly and rough, and it was an odd near-square at eight-by-nine inches. The lines were widely spaced, and the message covered most of both sides of the paper. The medium wasn’t what held her attention, though. It was the script. Though she hadn’t seen much of it lately, she knew that regular, meticulous cursive hand as well as she knew her own. So well that she recognized it instantly even when it recorded zingers like “ _Fur npphfrq gurz bs orvat wrnybhf orpnhfr lbh’er abg nsenvq gb or lbhefrys._ ” An email would have been simple to decode, just a matter of figuring out the cipher and then running it through one of dozens of websites dedicated to that sort of thing. A longhand hard copy was an invitation to work. (The question of how this page had landed on her bed while she slept was a question she’d chosen to pursue some other time.) She supposed she could type the entire message and then work from there, but it seemed both tedious and beside the point.

She had been dramatically bemoaning the pointlessness of existence for months, to the annoyance of her doofus brothers, upbeat sister, and aggravatingly sensible parents. Pivoting to a simple, unaffected complaint about an upset stomach got everyone’s attention, and now she was home for the day with just this piece of paper for company. She hadn’t played any code-breaking games in years, but a lot of obvious clues were staring her in the face, and a couple of questions.

Clue: The salutation had a grave accent over an R. Given the source and given some other contextual evidence, that had to be an È. The first two words, _Pur̀er Anapl_ , were almost certainly “Chère Nancy.” (That’s French for “Dear Nancy.”) Great! So far she knew, and wrote down, that A=N, E=R, L=Y, N=A, P=C, R=E, and U=H. Good start.

Clue: From the valediction she inferred that O=B.

Question: _cheryl.purely@_____.pbz_ was obviously an email address, but the username looked unencrypted. Why would someone do that? At least it helped her to gather, since P=C, that B=O and Z=M.

By now Nancy had begun to notice something odd about this code. E and R interchanged, as did A and N, and B and O. Was every letter paired with another letter in the same way? Why would someone do that when designing a code? Then again, she supposed that making it too hard to break would have defeated the purpose, since the two of them hadn’t agreed ahead of time on a code in years and neither remembered what it had been.

She was just getting around to how V had to be I (and I probably V) when she glanced back at the email address and noticed that the first word ended with YL, the second with LY. Funny. But the middle two letters! ER and RE, and she already knew that those were mirror pairs in this code! And since P=C, then C=P, probably. “ _cheryl.purely@_____.pbz_ ” was code for “ _purely.cheryl@_____.com_ ”! Nancy grinned wider than she’d lately allowed herself to do in public. This was just like playing mystery games with an old friend.

 _No, stupid_ , she told herself.  _It_ is _playing mystery games with an old friend_.

She grabbed a pen of her own and rapidly started filling in plaintext in the generous spaces between lines. The more she broke, the easier it got to break the rest. At some point she realized that it was a regular cipher, with every letter substituted for one 13 spaces ahead (or behind, because that’s how the number 26 works). She put down the paper, pulled up her laptop, and searched for “13th letter code.” Then she spent the next ten minutes learning about the cryptographically useless but amusingly weird ROT13 cipher, including its habit of producing mirror words like “purely” and “Cheryl.” She polished off the rest of the message in no time at all.

It’s hard to be voluntarily depressed in the face of someone who cares about you. Nancy went to the same webmail host, registered pyrex.clerk@_____.com, and composed a message but saved it as a draft. That night, when she saw light and activity (probably homework not due for two weeks) in the window across from hers, she darkened her own bedroom, then logged in and hit send.

> _Tnergu? V jbhyq arire. Ynfg jrrx ur pnyyrq lbh na nssvezngvir npgvba pnfr jnvgvat gb unccra._
> 
> _Ybbx bhg lbhe jvaqbj._
> 
> _Gbhwbhef gba nzvr,_
> 
> _AFP_  

Nancy barely heard the distinctive _ping_ of a phone registering a newly received message. She lay in wait for a minute, until a face was clearly visible in the window. Then, from the shadows, she struck a match. The flame of the burning letter was brilliant, quick, and ashless. She was sure it illuminated her face, and for once it didn’t bother her that someone could see her smiling.

* * *

Twelve Years Later (But Two Years Ago): Back to the High School Reunion

  
Nancy hovered in the privacy of a bathroom stall. She was thumb-typing on her phone, forcing her not-yet-entirely-sober brain to focus. _Risks_ , she thought. _Heroics. Bravery. I can do brave. Just a different kind._ Tap, tap, tap. It was slow work, and she had to suppress the loquacity that came so naturally when she wrote.

She’d never removed the email account from her phone—had, in fact, ported it to a new one, even with nobody talking on the other end. Its **Inbox (0)** was a constant low-grade reminder of absence, but how could she delete that? What if— no, no time for speculating. Tap, tap, tap. 

> From: pyrex.clerk@_____.com  
>  To: purely.cheryl@_____.com  
>  Subject: Je sais que tu es là
> 
> Qrne Oerr,
> 
> I know you haven’t disappeared, because I never heard from your parents and they would have asked me. You’re out there somewhere. I’m at reunion. You’re one of two big question marks in the room, and you might not like the company you’re keeping.
> 
> Are you reading this? Is it hard for you to read? It’s hard for me to write. You’ve had two years. Time to make a choice: Raise your hand and say “present” or get marked absent, and it’s on your permanent record. I’m tired of waiting.
> 
> Yours unless you decide I’m not,
> 
> NSC

Nancy’s finger shook over “send.” _Am I brave enough for this? Is this even a good idea? What do I gain and what do I lose?_ She took two deep breaths. Three. She hit “discard.”

“Or,” she said aloud to nobody, “I could just quit my job.”

* * *

Epilogue: Election Night

  
Lysa Washington’s campaign office was a storefront in a sleepy upstate farming town. Most of her campaign staff were at home, sleeping off the fruitless eleventh-hour push, but her campaign manager had chosen to stand on ceremony, or something else, and insisted on being there in the office to watch the returns. She’d allowed her son to stick around, too. This would be an important lesson in … something. She wasn’t sure what. What does a fourth grader take away from watching his mom lose a hopeless fight?

The mood was supposed to have been dignified, resigned, or maybe just relieved. Nobody had told the mood that. The live feed on the choppy local Internet connection reported that the vote was something nobody thought it would ever be: close. She yanked her eyes away from the screen and looked down at Lysander, who was leaning against her half asleep, and then at the campaign manager. He didn’t notice. He was utterly transfixed.

She thought he might have lost interest when the vote was finally called in favor of her opponent, the incumbent who had been forced to shift strategies from ignoring her to mercilessly railing against her real and imagined shortcomings. Instead he stood up from the office’s nicest piece of furniture, a couch they’d found on the street in surprisingly good condition, and kept staring.

“Lionel,” she said quietly. “Lionel? It’s okay. It’s over.”

“Forty-seven percent,” was all he could say back.

She nodded. “I’m sorry. We came close. I know this meant a lot to you.” Sometimes more than to her, near the end.

Lionel shook his head. “Forty. Seven. Percent. You get what this means?”

“Is this another ‘she’s brilliant’ moment? Okay, I’m game. It means the other guys got fifty-three percent.”

“It means,” he said, looking at her finally, “that they were all wrong. All of them!” She raised an eyebrow. “Impossible. That’s what everybody told me. Told you too, right? It wasn’t impossible. We didn’t waste our time trying to do something impossible!”

“Okay … so what did we do? Fail at something that was only very, very hard?”

“ _Yes!_ Yes we did! But we can try again! You see? How many people didn’t vote for you because they thought it was a waste of time?!”

She blinked rapidly, a habit when she told people things they didn’t want to hear. “I’m not going to try again, Lionel.” She didn’t want to see his face, looked up instead. “I was serious about all this, but the campaign was too much. I have Sander to take care of and nobody to help me. It’s not … the stuff about me, I can take that. I’m used to it. But to watch everyone get dragged into it, how can I do that again? You saw my parents on the news. ‘She always did very well in school while she was still there.’ They had to add that last part, didn’t they? Had to find some way to disavow me just to keep their own dignity. I don’t know if I want to avoid this again despite them or to protect them from all that attention.”

Lionel was quiet for a long time.

“Tomorrow,” he said, his voice sounding artificially flattened. “Tomorrow we thank all the staff. Show ‘em the numbers, make sure they know we appreciate all they did. Then you’re a private citizen again. Okay?”

Lysa nodded. She extended her hand, shook his. She actually smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “For everything. I wanted this, you know, but … the purely rational part of my mind, the part that thinks about infrastructure and farm equipment subsidies, never really thought it could happen. Believing that was your job, and you were amazing.” Her wiry, muscular arms scooped up a son three quarters her height and headed out for her truck. She turned back and smiled again, awkwardly thanks to the load, before closing the door behind her.

Lionel turned back to look at the screen. He inhaled as deeply as he could.

“FORTY. SEVEN. PERCENT!” He felt like he could get anyone elected at that moment. No, felt like he could shoot lightning out of his fingers. What he had to do instead was convince this woman to stay in politics, and he had less than a day to do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are plenty of ways to decypher the ROT13 text in this chapter, including by hand, but you can also just copy and paste it into http://www.rot13.com/ or any one of dozens of decoding sites.
> 
> Nancy and Bree really do toy with substitution ciphers in the chapter books. I like to think that they never quite got over it. Another little canonball I threw in is Bree's dad's work, which has something to do with TV commercials and has him interacting with the props department (as in "Nancy Clancy Seeks a Fortune," when he lets his daughter play with a metal detector he rented for an ad).
> 
> This chapter began as a way to set up a device I need later. It did that, but it wound up going a lot of places in the mean time. I spent way too much energy thinking about how to have them take down the Top Secret Special Delivery mailbox because of a building code violation before deciding it was better to have it collapse due to years of wear and tear. You might have met Nancy's twin brothers, who were last seen as infants. Oh well.


	12. Confluence

The present. A pale face in a dark room stares into a bright screen.

 

> Dear Family and Friends,
> 
> As you are all no doubt aware by now, I recently produced and published a video series intended to help people insert a little bit of elegance into their lives. I did this as an entrepreneuse and as someone driven to bring beauty into the world. For reasons nobody seems capable of explaining to me, these videos have taken on an interpretive life on the Internet that grows more disturbing every time I suffer a lapse in judgment and decide to learn more about it. I now understand the meaning of _la mort de l'auteur_ as never before, because this is simply killing me.
> 
> What you may not know is that five parties have so far filed suit against me for alleged offenses against them related to these videos. The suits seem, to my amateur eye, complete nonsense, yet I must go to court to have them dismissed, and I am hardly qualified to represent myself. I am also, to be perfectly candid, not in a position to pay what I imagine must be the exorbitant attorney fees necessary to make this all disappear. If you are reading this, I ask you to reach out to anyone you know who might be willing to offer some assistance in exchange for public goodwill and/or beauty advice.

Nancy re-read her letter twice. That last line was ridiculous, but what else did she have to offer? Not for the first time in recent years, nor even recent days, she had begun to feel an approaching crisis of self. What was she good for? How had an idealistic little girl become an adult in legal trouble whose only asset was a wellspring of ideas the world chose to misinterpret, plus an encyclopedic knowledge of composition and style rules (in two languages, no less) that she seemed unable to market?

“Is this where I wind up?” she asked the curly trachyandra that lived on her roll top desk. “Or do I go somewhere from here?” She then swallowed her pride, finished the letter, and hit _send_. It went off to her parents, her sister, and a few close friends. She trusted her brothers, but they were juniors in college and she’d decided not to burden them with requests for connections they surely lacked. (Even Jo was unlikely to be of much help, being based in small-town western Massachusetts, but she might know someone who knew someone.)

Nancy got up. She unwrapped the towel around her hair and hung it to dry on the shower bar. She dodged the bathroom mirror—makeup was already off—and headed to bed. For the dozenth time, she told herself things would be better in the morning.

Somewhere, someone read her message and clicked _forward_.

 

* * *

 

The Intern paced before a door, daring himself to enter. He straightened his hair, adjusted his bowtie, fiddled with his cufflinks. The sound of a telephone conversation emanating from inside the office served as an excuse to delay, and to rehearse his opening lines. “I’d like to begin by acknowledging …” he muttered. No, not right. Shift the tone. “I’d like to _begin_ by …” No. “If I may just start by saying …” Ugh. So, so awkward. The Intern, absorbed in the refinement of language, did not notice that the phone call had ended.

“ _Tout d'abord, laissez-moi vous dire …_ ” He shook his head. That could go very poorly.

“ _Dire quoi?_ ” called a voice from the office.

Blood drained from the Intern’s face, changed its mind, then flooded right back up to it. “ _J'étais seulement—_ ” he managed to get out, his voice cracking. “Er, that is, I only mean—um—just a second. I’ll be back in a second.” He was gone for 39 seconds, then returned.

“Come in” said a voice that telegraphed, rather enthusiastically, its owner’s bemusement. The Intern obeyed. The office he entered was hardly grandiose by the firm’s standards, but it was the largest meant for a single occupant in which he’d yet stood. The décor was a striking composition of blacks, golds, reds, and greens, rendered in stark geometric forms. Unorthodox, but it was somehow so perfectly integrated that nobody could bring themselves to say anything against it. Either that, the Intern mused, or the Junior Partner had more clout than he’d realized. The Junior Partner sat at her desk, chin resting on interwoven fingers, waiting for him to finish the job of walking into her office. “Have a seat,” she said.

“Thank you!” he replied, a bit too forcefully. He sat.

“Can I help you?” asked the Junior Partner. The moment had come.

“Er,” said the Intern. “Um. Ah.” Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet would have been so proud.

“Take a breath,” said the Junior Partner. “Start again.” The Intern obeyed.

“I’d just like … like to start by saying that I think you and I, we, uh, we’ve done an admirable job of ignoring each other,” he said, a gradual _accelerando_ running through the sentence.

This earned a cocked eyebrow. “I’m sorry, what?”

“To avoid any awkwardness. Keep things professional. It’s good. Normally I wouldn’t even be here—I mean, of course I wouldn’t, it’s not my department, even—but something has come up and—”

“Wait, wait,” said the Junior Partner. “What are you yammering about? Am I supposed to know you from somewhere?”

The Intern’s brow furrowed. “Surely you know who I am,” he said, in the tones of someone who is suddenly not at all sure.

The Junior Partner allowed a small grin. “Oh, one of these,” she said broadly. “Got it. _Surely_. Of course. Let’s see now. What favors are you owed just for being you?”

“I—I beg your pardon?” It had gone so much better when he’d practiced in front of the mirror.

“Hmm. Finance kid? No, not getting that vibe from you. You’re not connected to the senior partners or you’d know I’m not your doorway to whatever. Silicon Valley, maybe. Forgot that not everyone out there is famous out here.”

The Intern croaked. This was all wrong.

“C’mon son. Give me some direction.” The Junior Partner leaned forward into her hands. “Who’s. Your. Daddy?”

The Intern opened his mouth. Closed it. Considered that if he opened it a second time without saying something his countenance would take on an undesirable fishlike quality. Resolved to speak. Decided answering the most recent question would be a good start.

“Doug Clancy.”

Whereas the Intern had hoped that this conversation would go much more smoothly than it had to date;

Whereas recovery to the intended level of social grace seemed by this point to be perfectly unattainable;

Whereas the Intern was just beginning to perceive the full extent of the power imbalances, formal and informal, between an undergraduate intern at a law firm and a lawyer working for the same law firm, meeting in the lawyer’s office, under circumstances conducive to the impression that said intern was barely capable of speaking in coherent sentences;

Now, therefore, be it noted that the Intern derived more than a soupçon of guilty amusement at seeing the Junior Partner temporarily at a loss for words.

She recovered quickly, though.

“I certainly misread that. Let me get one thing out of the way,” she said, her gaze suddenly unnerving in its intensity. “Are you Bobby, or Eddy? I’m sorry, it’s always been hard to tell.”

The Intern tried not to wince, but it showed a little. “Robert Antoine Clancy,” he said, before hastily appending “at your service.”

 _Robert_ , his interlocutor thought. _You’ve Frenchified the vowels and are working on uvularizing the R. Can’t bring yourself to drop the T, at least not yet._ “Must be a late-onset thing,” she muttered aloud.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just—” and then some pieces suddenly fit together. “Wait, _you’re_ ‘Antoine the Intern’?”

Robert Antoine straightened up. “You’ve heard of me?”

“Yes.” She allowed herself two blinks. “You ought to stop complimenting people on their ties and shirts so much. You’re famous for it and it’s not doing you any favors.”

“Oh,” he said. He’d meant it all honestly, but feedback was feedback.

“So,” said the Junior Partner, “how is everyone?”

“Everyone?”

“Your … family.”

 _My family_ , he thought. _Well, baby steps_. “Funny you should ask.”

 

* * *

 

“Hello? Antoine! _Ça va?_ Oh, well, that’s good to hear. Oh, you know … wait, did someone forward you that email? I didn’t want to bother you and Eddy. Seemed like it was out of your … you’re kidding. You’re absolutely kidding. Antoine, you astound me! Really, this is so, so wonderful and I can’t … wait, just to be perfectly clear, they understand that I’m not able to pay a full … pro bono. That’s incredible. How on earth did you manage this? An internship? Where? Wow. I’ve even heard of them. They’re a big— Well, yes, I got Mom and Dad’s annual letter but I don’t usually _read_ them because I already know everything that’s happening in our family. I suppose I should start reading them again. Still, _c'est très impressionnant_ that you’re just an intern and you still managed to get someone to do this. Have you always been that persuasive? I— what? Why should I sit down? I don’t see what you could possibly have to—. Fine. Fine. I’ll sit down. Okay, now I’m sitting down. Yes, literally, sitting on a chair. I just don’t understand why these dramatics are necessary.

“Wait, sorry. Sorry. Antoine, that’s not—. Yes, on the balance it’s a good thing that I was sitting down. Yes, I dropped the phone. Antoine, are you joking? Because that’s not funny. Still not funny. Still not … oh God. You’re not joking, are you. You’re not. Listen, I … hang on. Just. Let me. For a. _Oui._ Sorry, little bit of … _vision tunnelisée_ , I think. _Je respire. Respire. Eauqué._ Listen. Just to be perfectly, perfectly … yes. Yes. I … I will. Yes, I can do that. I’ll check my email. Yeah, today. I’m not busy. I mean, I’m busy, but this is … yes. Okay. I don’t even know what to say right now. _Merci. Je te remercie._

 

* * *

 

Numb was easier than any alternative, so Nancy followed instructions and tried not to think too much. Go to library. Scan documents. Email documents. Wait.

Receive more documents. Print documents. Sign documents. Scan documents. Email documents. Go home. Wait.

It was almost 9:00 at night when her phone chimed five times in short succession. The tone was unfamiliar—not her default sound for mail or text messages. Even after the day’s events it took her a moment to remember that she’d assigned it, years ago, to a separate mailbox. Inhale. Exhale. Again.

Pyrex.clerk@_____.com had five (5) unread messages. Nancy opened one at random. 

> To Whom It May Concern:
> 
> Please be advised that this firm has been retained by Nancy S. Clancy in connection with …

The letter went on about whichever lawsuit this was. It was addressed to the plaintiff, not to her. She’d been BCCed. She skipped the details, relieved that they were finally someone else’s problem. All she cared about was the valediction.

> Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions regarding this matter.
> 
> Very truly yours,
> 
> Breanna Robinson

No sooner had she read it than a text message interjected. Annoyed, she was about to ignore it when she noticed it didn’t come from one of her contacts. It read, simply:

> Bobby gave me your number. We should talk.

Nancy wrote back:

> He doesn’t like being called that.

The reply came quickly.

> So I gathered. You doing anything tomorrow around 6:00?

Nancy wrote that she wasn't. Then she received an address in midtown Manhattan.

> I’ll be there.

After a moment’s hesitation she added:

> I’ve missed you.

The other number wrote back:

> And I you, cherie. Bonne nuit

Nancy stared at the screen.

“Chills.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this is good enough to justify how long it took to write.
> 
> Someone recently introduced me to the Fancy Nancy cartoon show. I won't resort to grumpy fan gripes over something that my kid cares about a lot more than I do, but I want to note here that this story is based on the books and not on the TV series. This became more relevant when I discovered that television Bree has been given a surname, and it's not the one I'd been planning to use for months, but the show also lacks a lot of the detail that led me to write these characters as I have.
> 
> "Chills" is Bree's catchphrase in the chapter books. So, you see what I did there? I know you see what I did there.


End file.
